poor me

The truly bizarre Ben Stiller farce, "Night at the Museum," is no laugh riot, and misfires all over the screen, but it develops its own unique charm and leaves a pleasant afterglow. A family audience could do worse for a comedy this holiday season. Stiller plays an unemployed, divorced father of a young boy who (like Will Smith in last week's "The Pursuit of Happyness") is about to be evicted from his apartment when he suddenly gets a job as a security guard at Manhattan's antiquated Museum of Natural History.

But he discovers the place is haunted. Due to the magical power of an ancient Egyptian tablet, all the exhibits -- an eclectic mix of dioramas, stuffed animals and wax models of historical figures -- come alive at night and stay alive until dawn.

So he's chased around the museum by a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, Neanderthal men and Attila the Hun; besieged by Lilliputian cowboys, Roman legionnaires and Mayan warriors; and befriended by Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Sacajawea and an Easter Island moai.

It's a challenging job, but he learns to like it, and when the tablet is stolen and the enchantment of the place is endangered, he has to mobilize an army that includes a pharaoh, Christopher Columbus and a terra-cotta Chinese soldier to get it back.

As the movie stumbles along, Stiller is its biggest handicap. He's not very endearing or especially funny, and his keynote as a star is a self-conscious uptightness that can be entertaining in small doses but is very hard to take when he's in every scene.

But director Shawn Levy ("The Pink Panther") brings off a few laughs, the PG-humor is fairly clean (one monkey urination gag aside), and the supporting cast -- Owen Wilson, Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney (still ticking after 70-plus years as a star) -- is fun.

The movie also captures the special retro charm of the venerable New York institution, and brings its displays to fantasy life with a goofy vision that's hard not to admire and enjoy, and via an imaginative array of eye-filling, mind-boggling CGI-effects.

The script of the movie is flimsy and often self-contradictory, and its sensibility is shallow. But it's still out to impress and delight a family audience with the pageantry of human and natural history, and that's a surprisingly worthy ambition for a Hollywood comedy.